Time Essay: Cambodia: An Experiment in Genocide

The enormity of the tragedy has been carefully reconstructed from the
reports of many eyewitnesses. Some political theorists have defended
it, as George Bernard Shaw and other Western intellectuals defended the
brutal social engineering in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Yet it
remains perhaps the most dreadful infliction of suffering on a nation
by its government in the past three decades. The nation is Cambodia.

On the morning of April 17, 1975, advance units of Cambodia's Communist
insurgents, who had been actively fighting the defeated Western-backed
government of Marshal Lon Nol for nearly five years, began entering the
capital of Phnom...